A few weeks ago Ross Jones and Dave Donovan, of Independent Australia, sent me messages asking me to review Ross’s book on the Ashbygate saga. Despite being as crook as Rookwood I was more than happy to agree, and in due course a copy appeared in my letterbox. I was in the middle of reading it very, very late one night when I happened to notice “ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN” being run on one of the Fox channels and started to watch it. You know how you are in that semi-somnolent state when something is triggered, a penny drops, and suddenly you are alert and alive. What got me going? […]

[clear] In Australia, there has been a fierce debate over media reporting of climate change, particularly by the Murdoch media empire. In a recent interview in 2014 with Sky News, Rupert Murdoch, the chief executive officer of News Corporation and 21st Century Fox, maintained: ‘We should approach climate change with great scepticism.’ He commented: Climate change has been going on as long as the planet is here. And there will always be a little bit of it. At the moment the North Pole is melting, but the South Pole is getting bigger. If the sea level rises six inches, that’s a big deal in the world; the Maldives might disappear […]

By Margaret O’Connor 1 November 2013 If you want a quick and telling glimpse of the psychopathology that infested Rupert Murdoch’s power house tabloid News of the World (NoTW), turn to the Leveson Inquiry Hearings for Wednesday, 29 November, 2011. On that day, Paul McMullan, ex-NoTW reporter, reluctantly gave testimony about his work practices there – and, in defence of his and his colleagues’ calculated violations of others’ rights to personal space and boundaries, became globally famous for his take on the concept of privacy, proclaiming ‘privacy is for paedos….privacy is evil…..it allows (people) to do bad things.’ Then in response to this, Counsel to the Inquiry, Robert jay QC, asks […]

Margo Kingston note: I was a member of the press gallery for many years. When I left Fairfax to take Webdiary independent my Parliament House ID lapsed. I applied to the then Press Gallery Committee president Karen Middleton for a new PG ID and she signed off without a hassle. Yet I couldn’t answer some questions from tweeps this week about the status and powers of the PGC, and was surprised by the reasons given by the current president David Speers for refusing an application by Callum Davidson to join the PG as a journo for Independent Australia. The reasons for rejection were that IA was an opinion-based publication, not news-based, and […]